Lie With Me - Philippe Besson
A review of Philippe Besson’s novel about first love shaped by class, silence and the limits of what can be named.
161 pages · Kindle edition · Scribner, April 2019 · Translated by Molly Ringwald
What’s Love Got to Do With It?
A short novel that looks slight and proves otherwise.
Lie with Me is a short novel that misleads by appearance. The prose moves cleanly and the pages turn quickly, yet the book settles slowly. Its weight gathers after the reading ends.
The frame is simple. An adult narrator is briefly unsettled by the possible sight of someone he loved as a teenager. That moment opens a memory of a secret relationship in 1980s provincial France, shaped by urgency and silence. Desire is direct and physical, yet tightly contained. To allow anything to be spoken would give it a permanence neither person can afford.
At the centre sits an imbalance that never corrects itself. The narrator carries an early sense of movement, the intuition that departure might one day be possible. Thomas does not. He understands class, labour and masculinity with painful clarity. Silence keeps him intact. Restraint becomes a method of staying whole rather than a lack of feeling.
Besson’s prose stays lean and unsparing. Intimacy appears without decoration. Time is held at a distance. The idea of a future feels improper, almost indecent, as though naming it would fracture the fragile terms under which the relationship exists. Waiting turns into a condition rather than a gesture.
What gives the novel its lasting force is the adult narrator’s composure. He does not recast the past into something survivable or noble. Memory functions as record, not comfort. The town remains small. The outcome remains fixed.
This is a precise, unsentimental novel about first love shaped by place and class. It ends quietly and leaves no room to pretend it could have unfolded differently.
★★★★★